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MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo Video Card Review

Testing:

At OverclockersClub.com, we use a series of benchmarks to stress the graphics card. We will use a series of newer, as well as a few more seasoned, gaming benchmarks to show how well the NX8600GtT Twin Turbo compares to some of the latest offerings. All driver settings and clock speeds will be left at factory default settings with the exception of the Twin Turbo Setting to minimize or eliminate any variables from impacting the results. The setup we will use is listed below. We will be comparing performance across a series of 8600 series video cards to see if the MSI offering outpaces the pack or just settles in for the ride.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel E6750 Core2Duo 333x8

Motherboard: Gigabyte P31 DS3L

Memory: 2x 1GB Mushkin XP9200 400FSB 5-4-4-12

Video Card(s): MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo 256MB

Power Supply: Ultra X3 Modular Power supply

Hard Drive: 2x WD 250GB 16MB cache SATA

Opticals: BenQ DW-1655 Lightscribe DVD-R, Sony DVD-ROM

O/S: Windows XP Service Pack 2

Comparison Card 1: Gigabyte 8600GT

Comparison Card 2: XFX 8600GT Fatal1ty

Gaming BenchMarks:

Far Cry

F.E.A.R.

Quake 4

Need For Speed Most Wanted

Call of Duty II

BioShock

Far Cry:

First up, we have Crytek's first-person shooter, Far Cry. This game makes extensive use of pixel shaders and features polybump normal mapping technology to increase character details.

We will be using the Hardware OC Benchmarking Utility version 1.8 with the following settings:

Maximum quality option, Direct3D renderer

Level: Volcano, demo: Volcano.tmd

Pixel shader: model 2.0b

Anti-aliasing: 4×

Anisotropic filtering: 8×

HDR: disabled

Geometry Instancing: disabled

Normal-maps compression: disabled

While the framerates in Far Cry were not world beaters, they are definitely in the playable range, especially at the lower resolutions. The NX8600GT keeps pace with the more heavily overclocked XFX Fatal1ty edition.